AI Specialist II
AI in this role
AI Specialist building RAG pipelines, custom models, and agentic workflows to transform education technology at Coursera and Udemy.
About Coursera + Udemy
Coursera and Udemy are now one company, bringing together two mission-driven brands to create the world’s most powerful platform for turning learning into progress. Together, we help more than 300 million learners and 12,000+ enterprise customers build the skills they need for a world being reshaped by AI. Read more about the combined company by visiting our blog.
Why join us now?
AI is transforming how people learn, work, and grow, and the need for new skills has never been greater. Coursera brings trusted content and credentials from leading university and industry partners, while Udemy brings a dynamic skills marketplace and global network of real-world experts. By combining these strengths, we can connect more people and organizations to the skills they need, when they need them.
Shape what comes next
By joining our team, you’ll have the opportunity to reshape how the world learns and applies skills—and help millions of people participate in the new economy. Bring your ideas, expertise, and perspective to meaningful work that can make a difference at global scale.
About the Role
We at Coursera are seeking a highly skilled and motivated AI Specialist, with strong hands on expertise in AI and data, with the ability to work across data exploration, AI solution design, rapid prototyping, experimentation, and evaluation—turning ambiguous business problems and complex datasets into working AI approaches, prototypes, and measurable solutions. This is a hands-on applied AI role for someone who enjoys figuring out how the system should think, not just how the application should be built.
The ideal candidate is deeply technical, hands-on with modern LLM and GenAI systems, with experience building AI pipelines, and driven to push the boundary of what AI can do for education. You should be equally fluent in training a custom model, designing a RAG pipeline, retrieval design, agent workflows, evaluation frameworks. You will work closely with Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Software Engineers, and directly with the business teams who use what you build.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and Design AI systems by selecting the right combination of data , including retrieval pipelines, agentic workflows with tool use, and structured extraction from unstructured sources
- Architect and implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) for grounded, context-aware AI applications.
- Build and maintain agentic AI workflows using frameworks such as Langgraph, Mastra, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, or AutoGen including multi-step tool use, planning, and autonomous execution loops.
- Design and run evaluation for every AI system you ship, covering accuracy, hallucination and grounding checks, regression suites, and human review loops
- Work with large-scale structured and unstructured datasets on cloud-native databases & storage (S3, Postgres, GCS, BigQuery, Databricks) with strong SQL and data modelling skills.
- Build rapid AI prototypes and experiment with different models, retrieval strategies, prompts, and approaches to find what works best.
- Partner with product managers, data engineers and backend/frontend engineers to translate business problems into well-scoped AI solutions with measurable KPIs.
- Document architectures, design decisions, runbooks, prompts, evaluation results and troubleshooting guides to enable knowledge continuity and team velocity.
Experience:
- 4+ years of experience in Data Science, Applied AI, or Machine Learning, with experience building data driven or AI powered solutions.
- Experience taking an AI use case from data exploration and experimentation through a validated working prototype.
- Hands-on experience with machine learning and/or modern Generative AI techniques such as LLMs, embeddings, RAG, semantic search, NLP, recommendation, or agentic systems.
- At least 2 production deployments involving LLM-based systems (fine-tuning, RAG, agentic workflows, or prompt-engineered solutions).
- Experience with AI experimentation and evaluation, including comparing approaches, defining quality metrics, analyzing errors, and iterating based on results.
- Experience using Python and SQL to work with data, build analysis workflows, develop AI algorithms, experiment with models, and build AI/ML solutions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Generative AI platforms and ecosystems such as Vertex AI, Bedrock, Azure AI, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, Hugging Face,LangGraph, LangChain or equivalent technologies.
- Experience designing RAG, vector search, tool-calling, MCP, agent orchestration, or multi-step AI workflows and LLM gateways.
- Experience with AI evaluation techniques such as golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, regression evaluation, human evaluation, ranking metrics, or automated quality frameworks.
- Experience working with modern data platforms such as Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, Spark, or equivalent technologies.
- Familiarity with AI observability, model monitoring, responsible AI, PII handling, prompt injection mitigation, and AI guardrails.
For more information about how Coursera collects and uses your personal information, please see our Coursera + Udemy Global Applicant Privacy Notice.
To protect against recruitment fraud, Coursera + Udemy recruiters only communicate via official coursera.org/udemy.com email addresses and never through personal accounts. We do not accept resumes via email or social media; please submit all applications directly through our careers page.
If you encounter suspicious recruitment activity, please report it via our Fraudulent Activity Submission Form.
Coursera is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a welcoming and inclusive workplace. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request at recruiting@coursera.org.
How we rate this
AI Specialist II at Coursera rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
- What NLP problem have you worked on, and how did you measure whether it actually worked?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI Agents, Fine Tuning, AI Evaluation, and NLP. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped — this role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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